Julia Ioffe left the USSR as a child and came back as an adult journalist to find that the confident, credentialed women she remembered from her Soviet childhood had largely been supplanted by those chasing marriage and domesticity instead. That disorienting reversal is the engine of her book Motherland, a National Book Award finalist that reconstructs modern Russian history almost entirely through its women. Her account, drawn from her own family’s history as well as the archives, keeps returning to one plain observation: Soviet policy pushed women into the workforce, the medical schools, and even into combat, while asking so little of men that low expectations became self-fulfilling—and Russia is still living with the results.
Julia joined Tyler to discuss why so many of Russia’s great constructivist painters were women, why the tsarist government established women’s medical courses in 1872, changing attitudes towards abortion and birth control in the 20th century, why the Soviet regime turned prudish, how Khrushchev’s plan to “replace the dead” institutionalized single motherhood, Russian superwomen, why Jewish men were a prized commodity amid rampant antisemitism, the cultural significance of flowers, why a few Russian names still dominate, why Russian women think Western feminists have their priorities backwards, how gender attitudes and autocracy feed into each other, three underrated Russian novels, what she wants to write about next, and more.
Watch the full conversation
Recorded March 2nd, 2026.
TYLER COWEN: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today I’m very happy to be chatting with, in person, Julia Ioffe. Most of all, we’ll be talking about her recent book coming out in paperback. It is called Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia from Revolution to Autocracy. I enjoyed it very much. Julia is also Washington correspondent for Puck, has written just about everywhere else, and appears on TV and radio frequently. Julia, welcome.
JULIA IOFFE: Thanks for having me, Tyler.
COWEN: Now, if I think about feminism in Russian or Soviet history, it’s striking to me how many of the top constructivist painters are women. You have Natalia Goncharova, you have Alexandra Exter, Popova, others. That must predate the Bolsheviks. What’s going on there? What’s behind that?
IOFFE: The Russian intelligentsia of the Russian Empire was a bit different from the Victorian intelligentsia or the Belle Époque intelligentsia of the West. On one hand, the law in the Russian Empire was quite stringent. Women weren’t allowed to do much of anything without their husbands’ permission. If you were a peasant woman, your lot in life was just to work and be a draft horse, essentially, and to give birth as many times as possible, and sometimes maybe satisfy your father-in-law.
If you were part of the intelligentsia or the upper bourgeoisie or the artistically inclined aristocracy, you often traveled to the West, were exposed to Western culture, but also you were very much engaged in wrestling with a question that they called the woman question, and how to emancipate women. There were various directions of thought in the late 19th, early 20th century, and some of them were quite radical.
One of the main masterminds of the plot to kill Tsar Alexander II, for instance, was a woman, Sophia Perovskaya, the daughter of a well-known Russian general. A lot of the revolutionaries were women. There were, in fact, so many political radicals that were women that the Tsars had to build a second women’s prison just to hold all the female radicals.
When the Bolsheviks took power, and before that, when the Tsar abdicated in February of 1917, women were ready to go. The women artists you mentioned fit into this tradition because there was so much intellectual ferment around the time, and women were at the forefront of that, and they were the subjects of the theorizing around that. What is the proper role of a woman? Can a woman work the way a man does? Can a woman parent the way a man does? Can a woman opt out of being a parent altogether?
COWEN: Even before the revolution, as you know, there were many more women doctors in Russia than in Western Europe. Your own sister is a fourth-generation female doctor. Women could own and inherit property, which was unusual for the time. Where does that come from? What’s the longer tradition? Because one thinks of the East as being worse with respect to women’s rights, but in some ways it’s not. What’s the correct mental model?
IOFFE: It’s just different. In some ways, it was worse than the Western model. In some ways, it was better. It was just very different. Like I said, this grew out of, again, a 19th-century grappling with what they called the women question. There were people pushing for legalizing abortion in the 19th century. In the early 20th century, the police and various detectives and their equivalent of social workers issued a report recommending it. They were going to legalize abortion in Tsarist Russia well before the revolution, but the Tsar overruled it because he was obviously hand in glove with the Russian Orthodox Church, which was quite reactionary.
There was this push and pull constantly in Russia. In some ways, yes, they could inherit property. The medical piece is very interesting, actually. For my family, that medical tradition started after the revolution. It was made possible by the revolution. Without the revolution, it could not have happened.
The tradition of Russian women, or women from the Russian Empire, more accurately, going into medicine is also intertwined with the radical tradition. Women who were inclined politically toward socialism, toward revolutionary activity, were banned from these institutions, but they were also drawn to, what is the thing I can do to help people? They could go into nursing, they could go into medicine, and they were lobbying constantly to be allowed into the medical institutes of the Russian Empire. They toggled back and forth between allowing them, not allowing them, allowing them to audit classes, not allowing them to audit classes.
The women who had the means went to Switzerland to study medicine. They were often women who were politically radical. Because of that, the Tsar’s secret police noticed that there were all these women who were radically inclined, going to Switzerland to study medicine, and they said, “Wait a minute, no, no, no, we need to keep a closer eye on them. Let’s force them back to the Russian Empire, open a medical institute for them, and keep a close eye on them here.” That’s how that started. Once the revolution came in 1917, free higher education was allowed for everybody, including women, including Jews, which affected my family doubly because we were Jewish.
Institutions were legally mandated to take any kind of gendered terms out of their names. They couldn’t be the Women’s Institute of something something or the Gentleman’s Institute of this or that. For my family, it started with the revolution, but the groundwork had been laid beforehand through this radical tradition.
COWEN: Intellectually, where does Bolshevik feminism come from? Is it from Chernyshevsky, August Bebel, or Clara Zetkin, or why does that win out?
IOFFE: All of the above. I think August Bebel was the first to really set down some idea of what socialism would look like for the female half of the population. As you know, breaking out people by anything other than class was anathema to Marxists, right? Class trumped everything, and everything else was a red herring used by the owning class, or the elite class, the oligarchic class, to divide and conquer the working class, the proletariat.
There were some socialists starting with Bebel, with Engels, who said, “Okay, but we can’t have a revolution without women. Women have a specific kind of existence, they have specific issues that need to be addressed.” Mostly, though, they were vague. I joke that it’s like in Seinfeld, they yada yada’d the details. They would say, “Yes, women have specific issues, and we can’t have a revolution without activating women workers, but basically, there’ll be a revolution, socialism will come, yada, yada, yada, and women will be emancipated as part of the emancipated proletariat.”
I think it was specifically women, like Alexandra Kollontai and some others, but mostly Kollontai, who really thought deeply about this, because it was obviously quite personal to her, about how specifically a revolution would emancipate women. She had some of the most specific and innovative ideas about how it would help women be equal members of a socialist utopian society.
COWEN: In the 1920s, there are many open marriages amongst the intelligentsia. What do they do for birth control?
IOFFE: Not much except abortion, which was legalized in the Soviet Union in 1920. They legalized birth control only three years later in 1923, which set the stage for how things looked at the very end of the Soviet experiment, which was that really the only form of birth control Soviet women had was abortion. The average Soviet woman, by the time she reached the end of her childbearing years, had, on average, anywhere between three to 12 abortions, and many Soviet women had many, many more.
COWEN: Was that a popular decision when abortion was legalized in 1920? Because even in autocracies, public opinion matters.
IOFFE: I think, like I said earlier, there was a big push from people who dealt with this to legalize it, because, as we know, women have always gotten abortions by hook or by crook. The question was, do they do this in a safe and legal way from trained specialists, or do they do it with the village mystic or the village babas who offer them some special herbs and might have fatal consequences? It was a popular decision in the sense that a lot of women did it.
Once it was safe and free and legal, it became popular in the ruling class. The men who were the ruling class, the Bolsheviks were quite egalitarian when they were in the underground and the stakes were low. But once they got into power, the top positions were generally not given to women. The men in the positions of power were quite worried that if abortion were legalized, women would take a frivolous approach to it and not give birth because, as one of them said, they’d be worried about their figure.
They knew they needed women to have babies, to keep having babies, otherwise this country wouldn’t work. They needed workers, they needed soldiers, they needed people to produce things and defend the country. They were worried that if they legalized abortion, women would make too much use of it. When Stalin came to power, he made it illegal in 1936 after he died.
COWEN: That’s binding, that it’s illegal?
IOFFE: What do you mean?
COWEN: That abortion is illegal under Stalin.
IOFFE: What do you mean, “is it binding”?
COWEN: Is it actually enforced?
IOFFE: It went underground, and we know that Stalin’s lieutenants, when they got women pregnant, were able to get them abortions even though it was illegal at the time. I think in Russia in general, the phrase is “the harshness of the law is mitigated by the need to get around it.” People got around it, but I think in general, most things were enforced in Stalin’s Soviet Union.
COWEN: So many of these communist societies, they seem to evolve toward an extreme form of prudery. We know what Beria did with women, Chairman Mao also, but the regimes themselves seem fairly anti-sex. Why does that happen? What’s your mental model of that?
IOFFE: I mentioned Alexandra Kollontai, and what I found so interesting was what happened with one of the things she wrote in 1911 about a woman’s need for sexual pleasure, sexual satisfaction, which was quite revolutionary at the time. She wrote that basically under capitalism—in this, she was not original—a lot of socialist writers, male and female, were saying that in the capitalist Victorian model, sex is relegated to two institutions, marriage and prostitution.
Kollontai was talking about liberating it from those two constraints and saying that a woman should be free to not only work for a living and be free that way, be economically free so that she doesn’t have to get married to live, and to go from her father’s house to her husband’s house. But she should be sexually free, in the sense that she can fall in love, find sexual pleasure in this relationship for a few days, a few weeks, a few years. Then she says, when she’s drunk from cup’s love and she is satisfied, she can say, “Okay, that was great. Thank you,” and go back to what Kollontai thought was the most important part of a woman’s life, which was her work.
She wrote this in 1911. This was quite radical, quite revolutionary. As soon as she is marginalized and pushed out of power and becomes the Soviet Union’s ambassador to Norway, a man comes in, Aron Zalkind, who says, “Actually, we need to clamp down on the sexual freedom that Soviet young people have discovered.” All we see in the Soviet university and factory dormitories is equality, liberty, and maternity—equality for the sexes, sexual liberty for the men, and maternity for the women. They said, “We need to clamp down on this.” They instituted basically the commandments, the sexual commandments for any young Bolsheviks.
They were extremely prude, that you should have as few partners as possible, that you shouldn’t have too many sexual positions, that thinking too much about sex and having too much sex saps your revolutionary energy. This idea that you have a limited amount of energy. We hear this from Donald Trump sometimes. “You have a limited amount of energy, and any energy that you use for sex, you’re not using for the revolution. We got to keep that to a minimum.”
As you said, it became so prude, Igor Kon, who was a very famous, incredible sociologist, sexologist in the Soviet Union and then Russia, he wrote that the Soviet Union became so prudish that it would make Victorian England look promiscuous. I think in part that’s because these are authoritarian regimes and sexual freedom, sexuality is a kind of freedom, and it’s a lack of inhibition. These are regimes that don’t allow for any kind of freedom in anything.
COWEN: It’s a common hypothesis that after World War II, obviously, a lot of young men have died off. There’s an unfavorable gender balance for women, and that this helps explain why Russian women made themselves so attractive to compete for the limited number of men. Is that true, or it’s just a fairy tale?
IOFFE: After the war?
COWEN: After the war, and for a while, right?
IOFFE: I think after the war and well into the present, I think that’s definitely true. A lot of popular culture and just basically the women’s whisper network reinforced that, but it was the reality. There were 27 million Soviets that were killed in World War II. About 21 million of them were men. Even going into the war, the gender imbalance was pretty skewed in the Soviet Union because before 1941, when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, you had World War I, followed by the revolution, followed by the civil war, followed by collectivization, famine, mass political repression, which mostly hit men, and then World War II.
By the time you get to 1945 and over 50 million Soviets were killed in the intervening three decades, many of whom were men, you have places where the gender imbalance was 100 women to every 19 men. There were villages where all the men left for war, and one came back and the women literally passed him around, or that man’s wife passed him around, to the other women if they wanted to have a child.
COWEN: There’s a lot of unmarried mothers after World War II, right?
IOFFE: That’s right. Part of this was by design. Toward the end of the war, it became clear the Soviet Union was going to win, but it had suffered catastrophic demographic losses. The Soviet Union lost 15 percent of its population in just four years. In American terms, it would be what? 45 million people in four years? It’s unthinkable.
COWEN: Unthinkable, right?
IOFFE: Right. They knew they needed to, as they said, replace the dead. Khrushchev worked out a policy plan for how to replace the dead. Stalin was quite a traditionalist. He believed in a nuclear family, so they forced men into marriages that were harder to get out of. One of the first things the Bolsheviks did in 1918 was to legalize civil divorce, no-fault divorce, and to allow women to seek child support and alimony from men, including when they were pregnant, including from men that they were not legally married to.
In 1944, the Soviet Union rolls out this policy designed by Khrushchev to make divorce very, very difficult, so trapping men in marriages, but encouraging them to impregnate women in addition to their wives and saying, basically, don’t worry about it. These women were not allowed to put a man’s name on the birth certificate if they were not legally married to these men. They were not allowed to seek child support from these men.
The state said, “We’ll do it for you. For every child you have, even if it’s out of wedlock, we will give you money every month until the child is of a certain age. The more children you have, the more money we’ll give you. We’ll give you military-style medals the more children you have,” which is an idea they took directly from Nazi Germany. Ironically, they said, “We’ll count children that were killed in World War II, we’ll count them toward your total.”
Basically, what it ended up doing was incentivizing and institutionalizing bad male behavior and single motherhood. It created the social and legal category, a protected legal category, of the single mother. The Soviet Union did get its baby boom. There was a bumper crop of babies in the years after World War II, but a third of them were born out of wedlock, which is not what happened in the US.
A whole generation of Soviet children grew up not knowing who their fathers were because there was just a blank on their birth certificate where the father’s name would go. Also, the men who were around, who were fathers, were just slowly made irrelevant in their own homes. They focused maybe on the workplace, more on the bottle, and parenthood became synonymous with motherhood in the years after World War II.
Again, if you think about how you make a baby boom with very few men is you have women hunting for men, many of whom are probably still married, their wives trying to fend off these women who are trying to take their man from them, and you still have this 80 years later in Russian society. This idea you get it with your mother’s milk as a girl and as a young woman that there are not—if I had a dollar for every time one of my grandmothers told me that men don’t grow on trees. And my mother told me when I was in college, she said, “Find a husband in college because before you know it, all the good ones will be taken.”
Then you hear Russian women talking about how you have to be maximally attractive, otherwise another woman will come and take your husband. In Russian, you say она его уведёт, she’ll lead him away. This amazing Russian sociologist was like, “What is he, a veal calf that you could just take his rope and just move him over here to a different barn?” It’s bone-deep at this point among Russian women.
It does originate in the postwar years, when the pressure was on women to find a man to procreate with. There weren’t many around. There was also a whole generation of Soviet women who just were never able to get married or have children because there were no men to do it with, and they didn’t want to be single moms. I think that’s also a trauma that everybody has spinster aunts or spinster great-aunts who were a subject of great pity because they were never able to, as Raisa Gorbacheva said, “Know the joys of love and motherhood.”
COWEN: There’s a pattern I’ve noticed in many Soviet women of my generation or a bit younger, that they have their first kid at age 20 or 21, married, but then they divorce the guy and then have a great career. Is that just another form of single motherhood in a way, or the marriage becomes irrelevant pretty quickly because there’s a divorce and the guy is allowed?
IOFFE: Yes. I think, furthermore, I know a lot of women like that of my generation, but I also know a lot of Russian men of my generation, who, when Russia banned homosexual propaganda, and banned adoption of Russian children by gay couples, and then when they vilified the single-sex family of, let’s say, two men adopting a child or two women adopting a child, so many Russian men I knew of my age said, “What do you mean? We all grew up in a single-sex family. We were raised by a mom and a grandmother, and there was just no men around.” There were so, so many Soviets and Russians raised like that.
To what I was saying before is that men became so irrelevant as fathers that women came to see them, on one hand, they’re competing for men and it’s like a blood sport among Russian women. On the other hand, they’re treated with quite a bit of condescension and they’re seen as glorified sperm donors. It’s great to get married, but mostly what you need them for is insemination and money. He’s certainly not going to be a friend. He’s certainly not going to be a real partner.
COWEN: He’s not going to do household chores either, right?
IOFFE: Oh, God, no. He’s not going to change diapers, and he’s really not going to be around to help raise the kid. I think that started to change in the last decade or two among an educated urban elite, where fathers wanted to be present at the birth, they wanted to be very active, involved parents, but that’s a tiny sliver of the educated white-collar class.
COWEN: The woman has to be very, very strong, and she has to wait in line to get foodstuffs and be pushy and make barter deals. This breeds this class of Russian or Soviet women who are just like superwomen. Is that a good simple model of it?
IOFFE: Yes, I think so. Those are the women I grew up with, where you do everything and you make it look easy. I don’t know how to pronounce her last name, Greta Bucher?
COWEN: I’m not sure.
IOFFE: Anyway, this Soviet historian said women had to do these jobs, her work outside the home, household work, and raising the children, as if each of them were her only job. I would add, as if it were her job alone. Pretty much all women worked outside the home. That was also mandated in 1920 that women had to work.
When they implemented the policy to try to get a baby boom after the war, they tried to make sure that women wouldn’t just be stay-at-home moms by tying food places and daycare nurseries to a woman’s workplace to keep them in the workforce because, given the catastrophic losses they suffered in World War II and the years preceding it, they couldn’t afford to have women stay at home the way they could in the West. Women worked outside the home, they did all the household chores, they did all the cooking, they did all the child-rearing.
Let me give you an example. My grandmother, who died about a year ago, this time last year, at 96, she was a chemical engineer who ran the lab at a water filtration plant outside of Moscow in a little suburb called Rublyovka. It provided drinking water for a lot of Moscow and the Kremlin. She oversaw a team of about a dozen people. She had to be at work at about 8:00 in the morning, having dropped off my father and his sister at school or daycare. Then she would work. Then, at her lunch break, she would go into the surrounding forest and forage for mushrooms and berries. Mushrooms, I don’t know if you know, are pretty dirty, so when you come home, you have to wash them, you have to dry them, then you have to marinate them or preserve them in some way, cook them, very labor intensive. She’d go back to work.
Then at the end of the work day, she’d race to pick up my father and my aunt from school or from daycare, from kindergarten, then they’d go to the store, the first store, let’s say the bread store, the bakery. They’d have to wait in line to order, then they’d have to wait in the second line to pay, then they’d have to pay in the third line to pick it up. Then they’d go to a different store to get the milk and wait in three lines, then they’d go to a different store to get meat if they could find any scraps or vegetables.
Once they did that, they’d stop by their little cellar to get the potatoes or cabbage they had been growing in the brief growing season, come home, my grandmother would make dinner, feed the kids, try to help them with their schoolwork, and wash the dishes, get them to bed, then do laundry. She didn’t have a washing machine, so she was doing it by hand, boiling pots of laundry on the stove, using a washboard, then drying it all. If you’ve ever done that, it gets pretty stiff, so you have to iron every piece of laundry.
Then you have to figure out what needs repair, what socks need darning, what holes need sewing because you couldn’t just go and get a new pair of kid socks in the store. She said she was just always so tired. All she thought about was how she wanted a little bit more sleep.
My grandfather, meantime, who was an engineer and worked in the city, he’d be coming back from Moscow to Rublyovka. He would take the bus home. He would get off a couple of stops early because there were beautiful forests in this area, and he would walk home through the forest because he wanted to clear his head and breathe some fresh air. He’d come home, have dinner, lie on the couch, read the paper, watch the TV, once they got one, while my grandmother was doing all of this. This was not out of the ordinary.
By the end of the Soviet period, the average Soviet woman, after her working hours outside the home, spent about 40 hours a week doing domestic labor, which was pretty good because if you were a woman in the countryside, and you had even fewer modern conveniences, and you had farm animals and a garden to tend to or a plot of land to tend to, they did about 55 hours of domestic labor in addition to the work they did outside the home.
On top of that, as we said, you have to look good. You have to make it look easy. You don’t want to be a nag because you don’t want to drive your husband away, or you want to be able to catch a man. By the end of the Soviet period, as one woman who wrote into a Moscow newspaper said, “Soviet women can do it all, we just don’t want to anymore.”
COWEN: I’m sure you’ve noticed that quite a few American men will marry Russian or Soviet women, but not so many American women want to marry Russian or Soviet men. It’s a kind of market test, right? Why exactly are the men so bad? Why are they such louts? Maybe that’s a rude way to put it, but surely in one’s mind, one asks that question, right?
IOFFE: It’s a question that a lot of us who were living in Moscow in the late aughts and the teens were asking that all the time. I remember a friend of mine, a male Western TV correspondent, saying, “The women are so gorgeous here, but the men are so ugly and unfashionable.” He had lived all over the place and worked all over the place, and he said, “I’ve never seen such disparity,” and it was true.
The women like me, Western women who were living and working in Moscow at the time, said, “We’ll just wait till we get home.” I think it’s because of what I talked about before, or what you and I talked about before, which is that so many men were killed in the first half of the 20th century, and so few demands were placed on them because they were seen as an endangered species, in general. They were a resource to be fought over and protected.
In 1968, when the West was undergoing a sexual revolution, and women were fighting for more rights, more equality, the Soviets were talking about saving the men, protecting the men, and saying, “We’ve done enough for the women, but our men die young.” That’s after a lifetime of alcohol abuse, smoking, being largely irrelevant in the home, and obviously politically, because it’s a totalitarian system, so let’s work on protecting them.
Soviet men, and then Russian men, became these coddled, spoiled children essentially, where on one hand, so little was asked of them that it’s the bigotry of low expectations. So little was asked of them, and very little was expected of them, and they rose to meet those very low expectations.
On top of that, the idea of what made a man a manly man in Russia is he’s physically strong, but he dies a young death, or he dies an early death. He drinks a lot, he smokes a lot, he’s reckless, he’s careless, and takes a lot of risk, and that usually means an early death. If you have fewer men to begin with, and as a Russian woman, you see them dying early, and you’re fighting over them, what is the impetus for men to take care of themselves, to act better, be better, if there’s always going to be a beautiful, super competent woman to take him if you don’t want him?
COWEN: These points you’re raising, historically, do you feel it’s been quite different for Soviet and Russian Jews or the same?
IOFFE: I think it’s a little bit different. The caveat is, and I hate that I have to say this, Jews are people too, and subject to the same social forces that everybody else is, but culturally, Soviet Jews were more educated as a rule, more urban, and culturally came from a very family-centric tradition. Russian women, actually, for all the intense antisemitism in the Soviet Union, in Russia, Jewish men were actually a prized commodity for Russian women.
COWEN: With ethnic Russian women?
IOFFE: Yes. Ethnic Ukrainian women, you name it, because the cultural stereotype was that Jewish men don’t drink, they don’t hit you, they are family-focused, family-oriented, they’re involved fathers, they bring their money home, they don’t waste it at the bar or on bottles of vodka with their buddies. That’s the kind of man you would want as a husband. Ironically, the same polls that will tell you that Russians would want their daughters to marry a Jew will tell you that they don’t want their president to be a Jew.
COWEN: I have some simple, common-sense questions about Russian women, say, compared to American women. How does the role of flowers differ for Russian and Soviet women?
IOFFE: Have you spent time in Russia?
COWEN: My wife was born in Moscow. I can say that.
IOFFE: Oh, okay.
COWEN: I’ve been to Russia.
IOFFE: Okay, when did she come over?
COWEN: 1991, I believe, right before the Soviet Union fell.
IOFFE: Was she an adult?
COWEN: She was a refugee.
IOFFE: Was she an adult or a kid?
COWEN: An adult—
IOFFE: An adult, yes.
COWEN: —with a daughter, one-quarter Armenian—
IOFFE: Oh, wow.
COWEN: —the rest Jewish, Pale of Settlement. A reasonably common background.
IOFFE: Yes, yes, yes, very. The reason I ask is, you’re clearly asking these questions from a place of deep personal experience.
COWEN: Also, I’m host, I’m supposed to know things, right?
IOFFE: No, I know.
COWEN: The other day, we recorded about Mexico.
IOFFE: No, sure, but what I mean is the questions seem like they come from a place of personal experience.
COWEN: Oh, of course. They’re what I want to know.
IOFFE: Yes, yes, yes. Well, also, it feels like you’re drawing on some personal knowledge.
COWEN: Absolutely.
IOFFE: Sorry, so what was the question?
COWEN: The role of flowers is different for Soviet and/or Russian women. How different, and why?
IOFFE: It’s a really good question. I noticed that a lot when I lived there. You can’t go half a block—not a block, half a block—without encountering at least one or two flower shops. You’ve got to give flowers to women on their birthday, on March 8th, which is International Women’s Day, which is ironically when—
COWEN: I never get that one right, to be clear.
IOFFE: March 8th?
COWEN: I never know when it is, International Women’s Day.
IOFFE: It’s March 8th.
COWEN: I know you can say it, but when March 8th rolls around—
IOFFE: It’s coming up.
COWEN: Yes.
IOFFE: It’s coming up.
COWEN: I’m not ready.
IOFFE: Place your order now. Because what? We have six days.
COWEN: That’s right.
IOFFE: We’re taping this in March. March 8th, Women’s Day. When else? Her child’s birthday.
COWEN: That one I know. Yes.
IOFFE: I give my mother-in-law flowers every year on my partner’s birthday. She’s very American. The first time I did that, she was completely blown away, but I was like, “This is the tradition I come from. You did the work.” Of course, you don’t give something to the father. You give it to the mother in recognition of the fact that, let’s be real, she’s the one who raised the kid.
When else? New Year’s. If you’re coming over just for dinner, you give the woman of the house flowers. You see Putin doing it all the time. If he gives a medal, any kind of state medal, to a woman, like Margarita Simonyan, the head of RT, he gives her flowers with the medal.
I know that when Toria Nuland and Celeste Wallander were negotiating with the Russians in the Minsk negotiations over Ukraine during the end of the Obama administration, after Russia invaded Ukraine for the first time in 2014, Surkov at the time, who was in charge of this stuff, arrived each time with a big bouquet of flowers, the national flower for the Donetsk People’s Republic, and a bouquet of the national flower of the Luhansk People’s Republic for each of the two women, kind of signifying, trolling them, saying, “You’re women first, and then you’re maybe the negotiators.” I think the role is—how would you articulate it?
COWEN: Something about it’s a lower trust society, and one has to signal certain things repeatedly and frequently. It’s similar to holding open the door.
IOFFE: Yes, but what are you signaling with the flowers to a woman?
COWEN: Ongoing loyalty. The old joke. I think it’s Romanian rather than Russian. What’s the Romanian word for friend? Future enemy. Groups are very tight, but people get purged all the time. To keep on signaling so you don’t get purged or that you’re not a purger is I think what’s going on with the flowers, is opening the door, but it’s still somewhat of a mystery to me.
IOFFE: I don’t think it’s that. I think it’s about, on the surface level, you had all this rhetoric and policy about women being equal to men, but really, Soviet society remained a pretty essentialist place. People saw women, “Women are this, and men are that,” and post-Soviet Russia leaned into that a lot. The stereotypes of what a woman is and what a man is became so exaggerated, so cartoonish, and women were cartoonishly feminized.
I remember when I lived in Russia, a Westerner made a joke that all Russian women look like Jessica Rabbit. What do all women want? They want jewelry. They want flowers. They want chocolate. They want manicures. It’s just part of this gender essentialism that you see. What do men want? Men want alcohol. They want cars. They want cigarettes. They want prostitutes in the banya. They want hunting and fishing trips.
When I was able to travel to Russia, when I lived there, all I heard was, “In Russia, men are men and women are women,” as opposed to you androgynous weirdos in the West. I think flowers are very much a part of that, that this is what you do for women. By the way, I had people I would interview for work. We’d meet for clearly a work lunch. They would bring me flowers because I was a woman first.
That’s why I told the story of Surkov bringing bouquets of flowers for two of the most senior American diplomats in the Obama administration. He knew that he was trolling them with that by saying, “Yes, you think you’re a diplomat, but you’re a woman first and foremost.”
COWEN: This question has long puzzled me. Why do so many Soviet and/or Russian women, they seem to have about five names? My shortlist is Masha, Natasha, Lena, Katya, and Yulia. My wife is a Natasha. You’re Yulia, right?
IOFFE: Yes. You missed Olga.
COWEN: Maybe there’s six. Yes.
IOFFE: Oh my god. There’s a lot of Olgas.
COWEN: There’s a lot of Olgas, yes.
IOFFE: Lyudmila, Svetlana. I would say 10. The same for men. This is something we used to joke about all the time. I mentioned my grandmother dying. I mentioned my mother-in-law, who’s American. My in-laws came to my grandmother’s funeral. At one point, I leaned over to my mother-in-law, and I said, “Oh, that’s Michael. You know Michael.” She was like, “Julia, everybody here is named Michael.” Mikhail.
COWEN: Yes, sure.
IOFFE: She said, when they were naming the pallbearers, they said, “Michael. Michael. Michael.” I know so many other Yulias, so many other Olyas, Natasha. Yes, Natasha, Masha, Svetlana, Lyudmila, Katya. With the men, it’s Mikhail, Sergey.
COWEN: Petr, right?
IOFFE: Petr, dah.
COWEN: Yes.
IOFFE: Let’s see. Who else? Volodya, Vladimir, right?
COWEN: Yes.
IOFFE: Andrey.
COWEN: Sure.
IOFFE: I know so many. I think because it’s a very conformist society.
COWEN: It’s also a society where there’s a lot of room for weirdos, right? The great Russian mathematicians, or authors, or the holy men. There’s a certain space in which you can be a weirdo in Russian culture and be accepted.
IOFFE: Yes, but that’s after you’re named already. Your parents might not have been weirdos. I think it’s just a very conformist place, and these are girls names, and these are boys names. I think you see people getting a little bit more creative with names now. I think what they’re reaching for are these old Slavic names. You see a lot more Zakhar, and let’s see, Sieva, for boys. For girls, you see Alevtina or Agroyna, these old, old peasant biblical names. I think that’s how this bougie, educated upper-middle class in Russia wants to differentiate itself, by reaching back to the Russian, deeply Slavic past.
COWEN: Why do so many Russian women seem to think that American feminists, they’re somehow weak or misguided or off? What’s going on there?
IOFFE: Ugly and man-hating.
COWEN: That too, yes.
IOFFE: Because I think that’s the right-wing caricature of them in the West as well. The Bolsheviks were very anti-feminist. Even though they introduced reforms that were actually quite feminist, they believe feminism was anathema to socialism because it’s splitting people out by gender, not class. There was always this deep antipathy to feminism. Then, after the war, it ran into, and I would say after the Soviet collapse, why do you want to add more things for a woman to do, and why do you put down men? Why do you hate men when they are so few and so precious? We need to lift the man.
One Russian feminist scholar put it this way. She said, “Western feminism comes in and says, we need to take care of the women, we need to protect the women and not the men. The men have too much. We need to give women more.” In the Russian reality, it’s like, but it’s the men who are pathetic. The women are doing just fine. The women will always be fine because they’re strong, resourceful. We need to worry about the men. It’s seen as having the wrong priorities for the place.
Yes, there’s this idea that Western women aren’t feminine enough, that they don’t take care of themselves. So many Russian women would ask me this, how come American women, how come European women don’t take care of themselves? Meaning, how come they don’t always have their nails done? How come they always don’t have a full face of makeup on? They don’t have their hair done. They’re not always perfectly dressed, put together.
The joke I heard living in Russia was, you have to be dressed to the nines all the time, even when you take out the garbage, because what if you run into a single oligarch when you take out the garbage? You want to look good. You never know.
COWEN: The attitudes toward the #MeToo movement are different also, right?
IOFFE: Very different. Again, there are Russian feminists, and there were more and more and more up to, I would say, the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 four years ago. There were different attitudes toward the #MeToo movement. There was a very strong indigenous #MeToo movement that actually started in Ukraine in 2016 and then crossed over into Russia called “Я не боюсь сказать,” “I’m not afraid to say.”
It was a hashtag years before #MeToo, where Ukrainian women and then Russian women took to social media and said, “I’m not afraid to talk about my experience. My mother, my grandmothers, my great-grandmothers whispered about this, but I’m going to speak honestly about the harassment I encountered, the sexism I encountered, the rape, the assault that I encountered.”
There was that, but when the #MeToo movement came from the West, there was also a class of people, including in the Western-oriented intelligentsia, that saw this as this kind of prudishness that they saw in the Soviet Union, which you and I spoke about, and they saw it as a lack of due process that they saw not just in the Soviet period, but under Putin. They were conflicted between, yes, women should be speaking out. There were Russian women who were saying, “Yes, this is great, and we’ve been trying to push this for years.”
In this, some Western-leaning liberals and pro-Kremlin people were in alignment, which is, this is a lack of due process, and these are beloved cultural figures like Woody Allen and I’m trying to think who else. Kevin Spacey, et cetera. These people that they loved because of House of Cards, because of all the Woody Allen films that were taken down without the due process that they had come to respect the West for.
Also, the Russian opposition was quite sexist and quite essentialist too. You saw when Pussy Riot was first jailed in 2012, Alexei Navalny, who had already become the standard bearer for the Russian opposition, said, “These were stupid girls. They should have not done that, but they’re stupid, and the state should let them out because they need to be with their little kids.” They’re mothers first. They’re not activists first. They’re not opposition figures first. They’re mothers first and foremost. They’re women first and foremost. I think that also informed things.
COWEN: All these gender attitudes taken as a whole, how do they feed into Russian politics today with Putin and autocracy and militarism and nationalism? Is that a close connection in your mind or somewhat contingent?
IOFFE: Oh, no. They reinforce each other. Just looking at the ads around the war. I’m thinking of one specifically that the Ministry of Defense put out where they show a man lying on the couch drinking, and then it’s like special effects, and you see him morphed into lying in a dugout with a gun. Or a man standing there bored as the security guard at a supermarket, and then he’s standing guard at a checkpoint in Ukraine, and various other images transforming an emasculated, pathetic, loutish Russian man into a soldier. The tagline was, “Be a real man, go fight in Ukraine.”
Russia also put out an ad aimed at Western Europe and portrayed Western women on dating sites, huddled by their phone in the cold with no light because there was no Russian energy coming into Europe, matching with Russian men in Russia who are like, “Oh. Look, it’s so warm here.” Then, they fly over, and the man is in this apartment that’s so warm. He has the windows open in January, and there’s all these girls running around in bikinis and their underwear because it’s so warm in his apartment, and how all these frigid Western women, in both senses of the word, would be flocking to Russia because the men there are so masculine and have all the heat and electricity.
Under the cover of the war, Russia has pushed, Putin has pushed even more pro-natalist measures, even more restrictions on abortion. They’ve criminalized the child-free movement, the LGBT movement. The government is pushing messages that the most important thing for a young girl to learn is how to cook borscht and take care of her man. That was the speaker of the Duma saying that.
One of Putin’s cabinet ministers is going around saying, “Hey, young girls, you don’t need a college education. What you do need is to get married young and start having kids as early as possible.” She herself, meanwhile, has no children and is on her second marriage. The state is upping payments for women per child. They’re even literally financially incentivizing teen pregnancy because they want women to have more children. Ironically, Vladimir Putin announced that 2024 was to be the year of the family. In September of 2024, Russia hit its lowest birth rate since Vladimir Putin came to power in 1999.
Six years before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia decriminalized domestic violence. When I was reporting on this for the book, I just couldn’t wrap my head around it. I kept asking lawyers, activists, victims, or survivors, “What was the point of this? Why decriminalize domestic violence?” Some said, “Oh. It’s to reinforce the traditional family order that the man is the head of the household, that he’s allowed anything, and that this is the traditionalist way that husbands behave. They beat their children, they beat their wives, and that’s how they enforced order in the home.”
One said something really terrifying, which was that it was to be a kind of steam valve, that in an increasingly stagnant economy, in an increasingly authoritarian system, men who were being told to be more and more macho and more masculine weren’t able to actualize themselves economically, weren’t able to make themselves heard politically, and where was all that aggressive masculine energy supposed to go? Well, here was a steam valve, you could beat your wife. That women now in addition to everything else they were doing for society, could also be society’s whipping boy.
COWEN: Do you think Ukraine is diverging from these norms at all? I know it’s hard to tell at this point.
IOFFE: I’ll be honest, I don’t know Ukraine very well, but what you do see is that Ukraine is reaching back to a different set of norms from the Soviet era, which is women fighting in the military. In some ways, it’s because Ukraine needs all hands on deck and it has a manpower crisis, and they haven’t been able to fix the manpower shortage in the Ukrainian military. From the very beginning, you saw women volunteering to fight on the front lines, like you saw at the beginning of World War II when tens and tens of thousands of Soviet girls essentially, teenage girls, went and volunteered to fight.
Some of the best snipers the Soviet Union had were women. They were tank drivers. They were fighter pilots. There were all-female squadrons of fighter pilots in the Soviet military. They did everything. They were sappers, machine gunners, spies, paratroopers. Over 800,000 Soviet women fought in active combat in World War II. You see Ukraine doing that, so in some ways, that’s a historical norm, whereas Russia is not doing that.
Russia is sticking to that very reactionary essentialism, that essentialism we talked about. Men are men, and men do man things like fight wars, and women are women, and they do woman things like have babies back at the home front.
COWEN: What’s an underrated Russian novel that you would recommend to our listeners?
IOFFE: There’s a few. Is that okay?
COWEN: Yes, absolutely.
IOFFE: I’m going to do more than one. The first I would recommend is Zuleikha by Guzel Yakhina. It’s a novel about a Tatar woman in the 1920s and ’30s when her village is collectivized and people are forced into collective farms. It tells a story that you don’t often hear about, definitely not in Russia. When you hear about collectivization and the horrors that it led to famine and people being sent to prison camps in the Gulag, you mostly hear about Russian farmers, Ukrainian farmers. You hear about the Holodomor, the Ukrainian famine, but it also hit the Central Asian republics really hard, and it hit the enclaves like Tatarstan very, very hard. This novel is long, like a lot of Russian novels, but it’s pretty extraordinary, and I could not put it down.
I would also recommend—it’s not really a novel even though the author won the Nobel prize for literature in 2015, Svetlana Alexievich. People may know her as the author of the Chernobyl Diaries which was basically pillaged by the makers of the HBO show, Chernobyl. The book Secondhand Time completely turned my head around and made me realize that I had been writing about Russia all wrong.
I would specifically recommend her book The Unwomanly Face of War, which is about these teenage Soviet girls joining the fight in World War II as machine gunners, as fighter pilots, as paratroopers. What’s amazing about it is it shows these young girls, they’re 16, 17, they’re girls, doing these very male things. If you’re talking about gender essentialism, what more male thing than being a soldier. Here you have these teenage girls doing all these things, and they don’t see it at all as, “Here I am doing a boy thing. I’m just doing my thing.” Because of how they were raised, because they were the first generation born after 1917, after the revolution, after all these radical reforms, they don’t see it as anything out of the ordinary, that this is something girls do too. I think it’s an absolutely extraordinary book.
Then, the third that I would recommend is Mary by Vladimir Nabokov. It’s a book I’ve been discussing a lot with my friends from Russia, so many of whom are in exile and who miss home and want to go home. I think it’s also a book that I’m sure a lot of my friends who are Iranian exiles would appreciate. I think it’s one of the first novels Nabokov wrote in exile when he was still in Berlin. It’s about living with your head turned and wanting to go back to a place that doesn’t exist anymore. Going back to a place, a person, a time that exists in your memory that just doesn’t exist anymore. What does that mean for being happy, for living your life? It’s a really poignant, beautiful, heartbreaking book.
COWEN: Before my last question, just to plug your book again, which I enjoyed very much, Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy, coming in paperback. Finally, what else would you like to write about?
IOFFE: Oh, I would love to write about what’s happening on the American right with women, about the Erica Kirks, about the trad wives, about how there are some American women, but I suspect more American men than women, who want to embrace this traditionalism, these traditional gender norms. We’re seeing this implemented at the policy level under the Trump administration, people championing this new traditionalism, this return to men are men and women are women.
Because so much of what I was writing about at the end of Motherland, my American readers, first my editors, my agent, and then people who read the book once it was released into the wild, were saying, “Oh, my God, this is so scarily prescient. It seems like this is the path we’re on in the US. Is this where we’re going to end up in the US?” I said, “I don’t know, but it’s not looking good.” I would love to write about that from the American perspective, but I’m doing other things now.
COWEN: Julia Ioffe, thank you very much.
IOFFE: Thank you, Tyler. Thanks for having me, and thanks for reading my book.
COWEN: Great.
Photo credit: Max Avdeev